"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
. ..
"Bret Ludwig" wrote in message
oups.com
It's crap, because the premise fails to answer the
question, "compared to what"?
As bit throughput, storage space, and processing power
steadily increase each year, 192 kHz goes from being an
onerous requirement requiring great sacrifice to
something more and more trivially handled.
But, it serves no purpose. It distracts people from far more important
issues.
While I
suspect it is indeed way more than is actually required,
the downside, once serious, is now less and less so.
So what? Following your logic, I need to have my car upgraded to over
1,000 horsepower as compared to its current 225 horsepower, because the
cost of upgrading to over 1,000 horsepower is not as prohibitive as it
once was.
44.1 is clearly inadequate.
Assertion without proof or even supporting evidence.
My ears are evidence enough. I agree that 192 kHZ is overkill for a sampling
rate and it would just complicate an already complicated process but 44.1
kHZ at 16 bit by nature requires that a lot of information gets left out
when dithering down. Many people can hear it clearly, especially those of us
that remember 2" tape to vinyl.
The harsh treble overtone
structures many listeners report from CD vis-a-vis vinyl
and analog tape are more than figments of their
imaginations: they are almost certainly artifacts of the
necessity of having more bandwidth than the signal can
occupy
No bias-controlled listening tests confirm this. It is well-known that
people's biases can cause them to perceive problems that don't really
exist.
I hear that! (no pun intended) That's why I never mix-down with cans. If I
mix-down with a great set of headphones, it takes me twice as long because I
always hear stuff that's not there.
. The oscilloscope community figured that out in
the 40s and many in the audio field-Neve et al- have
demonstrated it over and over.
Neve demonstrated no such thing. If you understand what Neve said, he
basically said that circuitry that resonates at say 40 KHz can have
audible effects below 15 KHz. If you look at the corresponding frequency
response curve you see that his circuit components such as input
transformers did indeed have effects on the order a few dB below 15 KHz
even though they were resonating at several times that frequency. This is
just the well-known behavior of resonant circuits.
Yet, Arny isn't listening.
Bret apparently did not pay attention to his sophomore electrical circuits
class that covered resonant circuits, if he ever actually even took such a
class. Or maybe he can't apply what he learned to practical audio
circuits.
Those CDs that sound the best are usually those of
material from a time where the treble cutoff was 10 kHz
or less, functionally.
No such thing. In fact high-sample-rate material (24/96) with strong
harmonics right up to 20 KHz are audibly unchanged by a proper job of
downsampling to 44 KHz, and even lower.
This is a very important aspect that this thread that hasn't had much
address. An engineer can use the best algorythm in the world and at the end
of the day they are still tossing information in the garbage. I was
recording at 16/44 for a while simply because I figured if it was going to
get dithered down to that in the end I might as well get all the information
I could on the front side. The truth is that for whatever reason, it sounds
better to me if I record at 32/96 and dither down, though the average
listener doesn't usually notice. The CD is an unfortunate example of the
dumbing down of our society and until there is a marketable improvement in
technology, it will remain. There are a lot of people out there that have
never heard amazing music and likely never will simply because they are
never around it. They are quite happy with their iPods.
This should tell us something too.
Unless, like Arny, we are quite literally not listening.
Obviously Bret you are listening to what I say, and quite irritated by it.
Too bad you can't rise to the occasion and share some wise words.
The CD was a serious compromise made in the early 80s to
put all of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on one single-sided
optical disc easily producible at then-current technology
at a diameter a drive accomodating it could fit in a 5
1/4" floppy drive bay. And, in all fairness, it could
have been worse-a lot worse. But to uphold it as the gold
standard is idiocy.
Show us your bias-controlled listening tests that support your claims,
Bret. My friends and I did our homework. We subjected high-quality musical
signals from live performances to 16/44 coding, in one of the finest
studios in the Detroit area, which was under the direction of Robert
Dennis who is still working professionally to this day. We used over a
dozen musicians, audio engineers, and experienced audiophiles as our
listening panel. No distinguishable differences were found.
We now can and should do better. And, we have, if we will but use it.
It is true that I have dozens of channels of converters that are capable
of running at 24/96 and 24/192. I've used them to record music from
broadband sources and compared the results to what happens when the signal
is further downsampled to 16/44. No audible difference for either myself
or my friends.
Anybody with high sample rate converters, who wants to listen to examples
of this issue being played out with broadband musical sounds can do so by
downloading files from
http://www.pcabx.com/technical/sample_rates/index.htm .